Seasons of Change by chantal norrgard

Author:chantal norrgard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE DECLINE OF THE LUMBER INDUSTRY

Under the La Pointe plan, lumber companies expanded their operations, eventually holding monopolies over all areas of production. They purchased timber stands and operated lumber camps in order to assure a steady supply of lumber. They operated mills in local cities such as Duluth, Superior, Bayfield, Washburn, and Ashland, making all of them prominent lumber towns. However, the federal government bolstered this process on reservations by stipulating that only one lumber company was allowed to operate on a reservation. Reservations resembled company towns. The J. S. Stearns Lumber Company dominated business in the town of Odanah on the Bad River reservation between 1894 and 1922, employing Indians and non-Indians alike. The sawmill employed so many people from Bad River and the surrounding area that when it closed in 1922, around 1,000 non-Indian residents vacated the reservation and a large number of Ojibwes were left unemployed. 76

Once the lumber companies removed all the valuable timber from the region, they moved to the Pacific Northwest, where timber was still abundant. Logging permanently altered the regional environment, rendering what were once dense forests into a landscape splintered with stumpage and cutover lands. The downed timber that remained after clear-cutting fueled forest fires, which destroyed any remaining timber and rendered the cutover land useless. Reflecting on this devastation, Jerome Arbuckle wrote: “The [Bad River] reservation at one time was blanketed with a magnificent stand of virgin white and Norway pine. This timber was indiscriminately slashed down until the entire reservation which comprises seven townships was denuded of larger timber.” Once logging operations were no longer profitable, he added, “the logging and timber company packed up of and moved out, leaving a group of unemployed Indians upon a barren reservation.” 77 However, an unexpected outcome of forest fires was the growth of berries; on the cutover land, the berry industry thrived.

Despite the diminishment of timber, the Indian Service continued to encourage lumber contractors on reservations to cut timber to encourage Ojibwes to farm. 78 While some land could support a few hardy crops, farming was still an incredibly difficult task. The rocky soil, marshlands, and short growing season on the north shore of Lake Superior in particular made agriculture a thankless endeavor. In her history of Grand Portage, Carolyn Gilman writes: “What an Ojibway was to do with 160 acres of in accessible, rocky cutover land was a mystery. Few ever lived on their allotments; many sold them to land speculators and timber interests.” 79

The combination of the federal government’s lack of insight and the environmental devastation caused by clear-cutting and fires rendered much of the land in tribal communities uninhabitable. When faced with the high cost of transforming cutover land, poor growing conditions, and paying taxes, many Ojibwe sold or abandoned remaining allotments. The sale of lands was part of the process of allotment that had begun earlier. But it was accelerated by the federal government’s push to harvest most reservation timber and the declining economic and environmental conditions that followed.

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